What do you get with the Performance Analytics out‑of‑the‑box content?

The plugins you activate install a lot of data structures to gather
statistics about your processes and services. Activating your plugins
also installs the jobs so you can collect that data quickly.
Additionally, the plugins install core visualizations and dashboards
that let you see trends immediately.

Here are the specific architectural pieces that you need to be
familiar with as you start working with Performance Analytics:

Indicators and indicator sources – Each activated plugin
installs the necessary data structures to support the daily
measurements for your process. For example, the Change Management
out‑of‑the‑box content provides data you can use to monitor trend
information on strategic key performance indictors (KPIs) like the
percentages of changes closed before the planned end date, of new
emergency changes, of urgent changes, and more. Each activated
plugin installs additional indicators and indicator sources to
support that targeted process or service. ServiceNow® provides best
practice KPIs for each process, and you can create your own
additional indicators and indicator sources for your organization's
needs.

Breakdowns and breakdown sources – Breakdowns add a dimension
of analysis to your indicators. For example, you can look at the
Number of Open Changes by Assignment Group. Or you can see
the Number of New Changes by Priority. The values for each
breakdown, also called "elements," are controlled by the
breakdown source, which determines the specific element list for
classification. For example, instead of seeing all assignment
groups in your instance for the Number of Open Changes, you
can limit the element list to just those groups that are part of the
change process by configuring the breakdown source.

Data collection jobs – The indicators and breakdowns
represent the data structures that are available for analysis.
However, the process or service performance data presented by the
indicators and breakdowns is collected through data collection jobs.
These jobs collect the initial historical data and are then
scheduled to run on a periodic basis (usually daily).

Widgets and dashboards – The indicators and breakdowns are
the building blocks for data collection and analysis. With widgets
and dashboards, you can present that data to your organization in a
meaningful way. The widgets are the visualization blocks or reusable
views of the indicators and breakdowns. You can place multiple
widgets on a single dashboard for insight across processes and
services. For example, you can put widgets containing incident
management, change management, and problem management data on a
single dashboard to see the data for the IT service management
workload across the organization.

Before you begin

Each indicator has its own detailed scorecard with interactive
analytics. After you configure your dashboards and widgets, click on
the data in a widget to see this detailed scorecard.